Microsoft's Week: Bing v2.1 and Death to the Black Screen of Death

Microsoft's week involved the release of several new features for Bing, its search engine, including new-and-improved Bing Map applications. Bing users can now view local terrain at eye level in 100 cities, in a feature seemingly designed to compete with Google's Street View. This week, Microsoft also wrestled with the erroneous perception that two of its Patch Tuesday security updates were responsible for a small number of PC users experiencing what quickly became known as the Black Screen of Death.

Microsoft's
week involved two words that start with "'B": Bing, its search engine,
which received multiple improvements and added features, and Black, as in
"Black Screen of Death."
Around the end of November, reports began circulating online that some
Windows users were experiencing what quickly became known as the Black Screen
of Death. As an error screen, the Black Screen's blankness lacked the panache
of the classic Mac "Bomb" icon,
but nonetheless it sparked a burst of panic in many Windows users and IT
administrators, who initially feared that the issue was widespread, and related
to security patches issued by Microsoft.

"In parsing the Shell value in the registry, Windows requires a null
terminated 'REZ_SZ' string," Prevx reported on its official blog. "If
malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include
null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting
in the infamous Black Screen."
Microsoft also asserted its security patches weren't at the root of the
issue.
"We've conducted a comprehensive review of the November Security
Updates, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the non-security
updates we released through Windows Update in November," Christopher Budd,
communications lead for the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote
in a Dec. 1 posting on the official Microsoft Security Response Center blog.
"That investigation has shown that none of these updates make any changes
to the permissions in the registry. Thus, we don't believe the updates are
related to the 'black screen' behavior described in these reports."
Budd also asserted that the Black Screen of Death was not "a broad
customer issue."
That other "B," Bing, came into play on Dec. 2, when
Microsoft announced that it was releasing new features for its search engine
that included the beta version of the new-and-improved Bing Maps. In
addition to Streetside, which provides Bing Maps users with an eye-level view
of local terrain (in about 100 cities so far) and seems designed as a direct
competitor to Google's Street View, the updated Bing Maps include "map
apps" such as Twitter Maps, which displays tweets originated from
particular geographic locations.
Other Map Apps give users access to elements such as current traffic, live
traffic video feeds from around the United
States, and local blogs tied into particular
coordinates. Overall, Microsoft seems intent on livening up online cartography,
a relatively static affair, with features that leverage real-time
information-the better, Microsoft hopes, to counteract Google's traditional
dominance of the online search space.
In addition to Bing Maps, the upgraded Bing-which
could be unofficially termed Version 2.1, if November's wide-ranging update was
"Bing v2.0"-included a new Bing Bar for Internet Explorer and
Firefox, which places much of Bing's functionality into a series of one-click
icons beneath the search bar. On top of that, a new Bing mobile application
lets BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Sidekick users search via spoken terms.
Bing currently occupies roughly 9.6 percent of the U.S.
search engine market, according to Experian Hitwise, while Google occupies 70.6
percent.
And then, from approximately 6:30 p.m. to 7
p.m. on Dec. 3, the Bing
site crashed.
"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some
internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," Satya
Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, wrote
in a Dec. 3 posting on the
official Bing blog. "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was
rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior."
Although Twitter users commented about the outage, there didn't seem to be
the same tidal wave of complaint that nominally accompanies unexpected Google
Apps downtime-meaning either that the online community has become more used to
outages among cloud-based applications, or else that Bing, with its market share,
is still popularly perceived as a minor alternative to Google. With its new
Bing applications, though, Microsoft is hoping to change that perception.

Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.